Ranger from Plymouth remembers the drama at Pointe-du-Hoc

Friday

Jun 6, 2014 at 12:01 AM

Antonio (Tom) Ruggiero, a 93-year-old Plymouth resident, is among the last survivors of the 2nd Ranger Battalion's D Company that scaled the 100-foot cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc on D-Day. When he tried to enlist in the Marines at Brockton recruiting, he was rejected for being too short. Ruggiero went on to win a Bronze Star for his valor in combat.

Chris Burrell The Patriot Ledger @Burrell_Ledger

When Antonio (Tom) Ruggiero was a boy growing up in Plymouth, he dreamed of being a dancer. “I was a performer, and I met Mickey Rooney,” he said. ‘‘My idol was Fred Astaire.”

It hardly seems like the aspirations of a future soldier picked to storm the beach at Normandy, but Ruggiero's strong dancer's legs and small stature would prove to be assets in combat.

“I decided to join the Marines, but guess what happened? They didn't want me,” recalled Ruggiero, a 93-year-old Plymouth resident and one of the last remaining survivors of the 2nd Ranger Battalion's D Company. “We had to go to the Brockton Post Office and they said, ‘How tall are you?' Well, I said, I don't make five-foot-three. I'm five-two. ‘You're too little. Go home and do some stretchin'”

Ruggiero, feeling feisty from the rejection, challenged the Marine recruiters: “How tall do you have to be squeeze a rifle trigger?”

Several weeks later, the dancer from Plymouth enlisted in the U.S. Army and into the elite Rangers. They were shipped to England to train for the coming invasion of France, but Ruggiero's company needed a unique kind of training.

Their target was neither Omaha nor Utah beach but the 100-foot tall cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc. And Ruggiero, nicknamed Ruggie by his buddies, was built for the job.

“I could climb like a monkey for chrissake,” he said, sitting in his living room in Plymouth with scrapbooks stuffed with black-and-white photos and yellowed telegrams in his lap. “They'd yell at us, ‘Come on you nuts, get going.'”

Ruggiero has spent decades reliving and retelling the harrowing events of D-Day and afterwards, and he is a natural storyteller, full of drama, detail, inflection and even humor.

The night before D-Day, one of the officers got drunk, Ruggiero said.

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“He was talking to the guys who were shootin' craps and saying, ‘We're gonna get killed. This is stupid. They're gonna chop us right up,'” said Ruggiero, his voice dropping a register to imitate the inebriated officer.

Vivid memories for Ruggiero come from the landing craft he and 21 other Rangers were aboard on D-Day.

“They gave us a paper bag because most everyone started getting seasick,” he said.

German shells rained down around the boats as they pushed toward the beach. Ruggiero was carrying high explosives. At one point, he swallowed some seawater that crashed the boat, and he stuck his head up over the gunwales.

His buddy, another Italian-American, grabbed him.

“Get down,” he told Ruggiero. “Don't you see those 88s coming over? One of them hits you, you're gonna blow us all up.”

About 300 yards from the cliffs, a German shell exploded just underneath the boat, flinging it over into the air and throwing Ruggiero and all 21 other Army Rangers into the ice-cold water.

‘‘Forty-one degrees, that water. We lost 11 of them. The guys drowned in the cold,” said Ruggiero.

“One guy couldn't do it (tread water). ‘I can't make my legs move,' but I told him, ‘Yes, you can. You can,'” Ruggiero recalled. “Well, I could because I was a dancer. Up and down, up and down. I said to him, ‘Just pretend you're on a bicycle and keep it going.'”

But that soldier he tried to help – a radio operator – didn't survive the cold water, and Ruggiero and his comrades – plucked from the ocean by a misdirected gunboat – didn't make it to the cliffs at Pointe-du-Hoc on D-Day.

Two days later, Ruggiero and the other Rangers were re-equipped and sent back to the same target.

“The captain said, ‘You got trained to climb a cliff. We're gonna climb a cliff,'” he said. “He says, ‘Come on, Ruggie.' So I climbed up and got that rope and threw it down.”

Ruggiero paused in the story for a moment and added a bit of local flavor: “You know, that rope came from the Cordage Company in Plymouth? Three-quarter-inch, believe it or not.”

Near the cliff top, they assembled and fell in with their mission: taking out Nazi outposts and their machine guns.

“You know how we found them? By mistake,” he said, laughing, then pointing to a photo of a man he identified as Capt. McBride.

He and McBride went out looking for Germans but got separated.

“Where'd he go? This way or that way?” said Ruggiero. “Once I hear his gun going off, his Thompson, oh, Jesus, he's on the other side of the hedgerows .. and when I looked over, I see a German helmet.”

Ruggiero keeps up the suspense.

Ruggiero said he had a small amount of ammunition and one grenade. “You have to pull that clutch back on the grenade, and I didn't want to do it because it makes a helluva noise. They hear it: click-clack,” he recalled. “My legs were shaking already for cripes sake. I wasn't ashamed to say it.”

Ruggiero said he stuffed grass and brush all around his helmet for camouflage.

“Come on, I was saying to myself, fire a burst, a good burst,” he said. “And I took advantage of the damned hedge. It went off. Eight Germans were killed. McBride ran right in and sprayed them.”

More than a week later, McBride was awarded a Silver Star and Ruggiero a Bronze Star for their actions.

He stayed with the Rangers through the Battle of the Bulge. Back in Plymouth, he became a firefighter and still remembers the training he did in Boston alongside police cadets.

When it came time for a swim test, Ruggiero waved it off.

“I said, ‘You guys swim. I did my swimming already,” he remembered, smiling. “But when they said you have to climb a rope, that was mincemeat for me.”